Boldly Going Beyond with SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge

SAP TechEd 2017 carries on this week in Barcelona, and SAP’s CTO Bjoern Goerke just continued his journey as captain of the USS Enterprise. Star Trek seems, to me, to be the perfect metaphor this year for digital transformation. You may have noticed in Bjoern’s keynote a reference to the power of SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge. Just as a quick refresher, the context was that SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge was what was used in the demo to help correlate special holiday promotions with a heat map of foot traffic in a retail store, all in the name of actionable insight.

But what is SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge?

SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge is an IoT solution, which helps enterprises run their business operations in a connected world. It leverages the Internet of Things to bring together business operations in a collaborative and persona-centric work environment. I assure you, the “enterprise” pun in this explanation was not originally intended!

But since we’re already here and talking about Star Trek, let’s talk about the other connection: Bridge. Just as the “bridge” on the USS Enterprise is often used as the central focal point for the captain’s crew to facilitate all the action and decision-making, SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge strives for a similar role in the present day “enterprise.” From meeting with our customers, I keep hearing that we are in a world now where running your business feels about as complex as one might assume it is to run a Starfleet spaceship.

So how does SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge go about helping the enterprise run business operations?

Well, it’s structured so as to enable a new level of interoperability among Connected Things (products, assets, fleet), Business (business processes, data), People (customers, partners), and Surroundings (weather, traffic, news, census, etc.).

Business opportunity and operational risk are often two sides of the same coin. And IoT data can often help with both but only if contextualized with the assistance of existing business processes and information you are already using to operate your business. In the case of the example shown in the keynote, IoT data highlighting foot traffic is of limited value without harmonizing it with the details associated with the holiday promotions happening.

And this is just one example. SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge is applicable across various industries and use cases, from outbound logistics scenarios to real-time visibility into Stock Transfer in intra-company operations with IoT to visibility into Production Orders and Production Capacity for Manufacturing operations involving Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMO). SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge strives to augment your existing business processes with proactive alerts, a guidance and resolution support system, and out-of-the-box integration across IoT data, backend systems, and enterprise applications.

SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge may not come with a spaceship to match (at least not with the current version), but we are nonetheless really excited by what it’s capable of. You can learn more here.